ABSTRACT
From the 1970s onwards, most Western countries began to amend their health care policies to give a much higher priority to preventive efforts. Although this preventive turn initially aimed to limit the need for medical treatment technology, whose advance was thought to have stopped, most countries have now developed public health policy into a parallel fi eld of intervention alongside the medical system. This major shift from treatment to prevention is typically referred to as the “New Public Health” (Petersen and Lupton 1996), and includes a whole new range of targets, approaches, knowledge forms and professions involved in health care provision. Constant across these multiple policies and contexts, however, is the overall goal. Practically all contemporary public health policies target the connection between the rise in lifestyle diseases, primarily cancer and coronary heart disease, and forms of human behavior, i.e., smoking, drinking, poor diet and a lack of physical exercise.
